Our organization has a weakness.  I imagine every organization has a weakness or at least does from time to time.  The problem with our weakness is that it is in a pretty important area.  It is an area that I will not accept to remain a weakness.

As a critical area of weakness I have personally taken responsibility for improvement.  My measure of success is not simply to address the weakness so it is no longer a problem.  The measure of success is to make it a strength.  I have even declared that in the name of the project.  I have boldly declared inside our organization that this will become an area of strength.

Here is my plan:

1. Get the Team Right
2. Perfect the Process
3. Execute Well

The first solution seems obvious when seeing it in writing, but we tend to skip right over that action to get right into the process.  Even as I write this post about how I applied it in one area, I am struck by the fact that in another growth area, we started by talking about the process and never discussed getting the team right.

Any business behavior is ultimately a process.  In my experience many weaknesses in business is really due to a lack of process.  It may be an utter lack of process so that it is undefined within an area or an unwillingness to follow a defined process.  So naturally in addressing any weakness a logical place to start is to review the process and improve it.  This is not only important from an operational perspective but to scale it.  Once a process is defined and measurable it is much easier to translate to other employees.

The real value is created once you have a great team executing a great process.  No matter how good the team is or how good the process may be, the execution ultimately creates the result.  The reverse is true as well.  If we try to execute without a great team or without a great process, the results will not be nearly as strong.